To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
-- John Gillespie Magee, Jr. "High Flight"
It's twenty years later and I still get sick to my stomach. No so much that we lost seven good people. That's cause enough to be sad, but we all come and go and when our time's over we should be happy for a life well lived. If you're inclined towards any kind of spiritual life, you might come around to believe that part of you survives after death. If not you can still take solace in the fact that even death can't erase the simple fact that you were once here.
Twenty years ago today we lost seven good people. But that's not what makes me a little teary-eyed today. It's the caliber of the people we lost. These are people who after decades of education willingly stepped aboard a thin metal and silica bubble strapped to 694,608 kg of ammonium perchlorate, 163,672 kg of an Aluminum / Iron Oxide, 554 cubic meters of Liquid Oxygen and 1515 cubic meters of Liquid Hydrogen. They did this without being coerced and even competed for the privilege of taking this risk. To get to launch day they put their personal (and in some cases professional) lives on hold for at least a year to undergo basic astronaut training.
These are characteristics of people you want to encourage. Sen. John Glenn, himself an astronaut, said it clearly in his remarks on the occasion of Judy Resnik's memorial:
We are a curious people, a nation that wonders about what we do not know, whether in laboratories or medical centers, from frontiers of the mind to frontiers of geography, and even beyond earth's limitations. We are curious about what is beyond the next hill, the next river or mountain. What's beyond the next bend in the road? - we not only want to know the answer to that question, we even want to determine where that road will go...
The conquest of space is not merely a technological project of interest to a handful of select scientists and specialists, valuable though that research and information may be.
It is nothing less than an expression of a basic American spirit. After all, we're the same people who tamed a continent, crossed frontiers, scaled mountains, and built the greatest strongest nation on earth. We see an opportunity, a challenge, think up a way to meet it, test it[,] adjust it and ultimately succeed with it.
It's easy to find things we do wrong. But every now and again we do wonderful things. Tennyson wrote of this noblest aspect of our nature in Ulysses. He wrote "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." We don't need to go into space. We could easily do it all with remote robotic space craft. But JFK said it plainly in his 1962 speech at Rice University:
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
We may measure our worth by the goals we set for ourselves. Amid the evidence of barbarism, there are moments when our full potential shines through; when all of us can share in the profound wonder of the universe; when as a people we reach out for the distant meadows of the future.
Every time a rocket goes up on a mission of exploration, that's a victory for our most noble nature. It is an opportunity to prove ourselves and dream a dream of peace and blessing and adventure.
Twenty years ago we learned that dreams sometimes come with a cost. We lost seven good people on a cold January morning. People who should be here with us to share the dream. And that's why every January 28th I get a little teary-eyed.
Apollo 1
Virgil "Gus" Grissom
Ed White
Roger Chaffee
Soyuz 1
Vladimir Mikhailovich Komarov
X15 Flight 191
Michael Adams
Soyuz 11
Georgi Dobrovolski
Viktor Patsayev
Vladislav Volkov
STS 51
Francis "Dick" Scobee
Michael Smith
Ron McNair
Ellison Onizuka
Judy Resnik
Gregory Jarvis
Christ McAuliffe
STS 107
Rick Husband
William McCool
Michael Anderson
Ilan Ramon
Kalpana Chawla
David Brown
Laurel Clark
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